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And the Oscar for the best performance goes to... Your statements are like these Russian soldiers, who accidentally got "lost" along with heavy carrier in a middle of foreign country. Please tell me that at least you're getting decently paid for such posts, and that you're not another misguided soul who thinks that big political bullies are meant to be worshiped.

kkleiner writes "With the cost of healthcare services increasing, it's welcome news that a recent deal between Walgreens and Theranos will bring rapid, accurate, low-cost blood testing to the local pharmacy. A pinprick of blood from a finger is enough to run any number of a la carte diagnostic tests with results in four hours or less. The automation of blood testing in one convenient machine may mean that the demand for clinical technicians may decline, but the benefits of making blood analysis more accessible to everyone is enormous."

Untrue for hybrid corporate environment. You get some kind of UAC related prompt almost every time you want to access resources on the network (and don't, please don't get me started on Enable Editing dialog of Office 2010...). It used to drive me crazy until I have decided to live with this - I just click it away (and hope that my antivirus will deal with a wrong click - if I ever do one).

Once upon a time, a golden rule was that - if you need more than two clicks to get to the goal, the interface is a failure. I wish Microsoft designers heeded this lesson.

Disclaimer: I may be biased since I really wanted to like and to use Google+ service. Since they could not accept my preference to use a well-established nick instead of my real name, I've quit. Almost a year later, my profile is still suspended. I still cannot set my status in GoogleTalk.I wish I could raise this with some support service, but... it's not really there. Google's motto should probably change to something like Don't be evil -- disclaimer: we don't give a damn.

Precisely... as in "precisely why I do not need to use their service". If you do not care about customers of your service, be it free or paid, they will wander away.

Disclaimer: I may be biased I really wanted to like and use Google+ service. Since they could accept my preference to use a well-established nick instead of my real name, I've quit. Almost a year later, my profile is still suspended. I still cannot set my status in GoogleTalk.I wish I could raise this with some support service, but... it's not really there. Google's motto should probably change to something like Don't be evil -- disclaimer: we don't give a damn.

I beg to disagree. While PowerShell does appear to be quite crippled (no support for scripts out of the box, access rights issues thanks to UAC), it still allows to do a lot of things previous scripting shells (VBS, WMI, DOS-like CLI) for Windows struggled to achieve. It is also actively supported by several third party vendors (VMware's PowerCLI) and actually well documented for several major applications (Exchange 2010).

It's still quite painful to wrap one's mind around its ungainly logic. But it works (in some important cases).

And for automation of tasks you need a shell. No GUI is going to provide enterprise-wide solutions on the same level as good old shell and command line.

I don't get this complaint. You want all tiles to be animated, or none at all?Live tiles are very useful. They could do without some gratuitous animation, I agree. I guess they wanted some attention grabbers for the first few minutes in the store.

Human sense of sight is attuned to following motion. When you look at the calm, immobile surface of an interface, you are free to proceed at leisure, but when something moves, you usually skip immediately to moving part. And so, when I look at Metro interface, and I see animations in People tile, I have this urge to check it out instead... whereas the animations are just there to prettify the effect. And the truly important content, like missed calls are reported by static number.

This inconsistency made me move People tile outside of visible area, even though it is second most used tile in the phone.

- while the interface is responsive, you still need to do several taps and slides to get a result you can set a single tap under an Android or iPhone.

Any specific examples?

Sure. On my Android phone I have a small group of toggle buttons - WiFi, AutoSync, Mobile Data (called Cellular Data on my Nokia), Flight Profile, Silent. The best I can achieve for the Nokia is to get a shortcut tile to an actual interface. So instead of "touch, wait for effect" I need to "touch, slide to ON position, wait for effect". That's just for WiFi toggle. It gets worse for the Nokia - there are simply no equivalents to achieve one-touch change into Flight or specific profile. To up the ante consider starting the service in bright sunlight - I can do it on my HTC Desire by tapping certain part of my screen (to increase brightness or to turn on the services), while on the Nokia I need to slide and slide.

- battery - ye gods, hopefully those of you who purchase Nokia Lumia 900 do not experience the issues we have in EU with Nokia Lumia 800. In short, it's buggy, unpredictable, goes haywire in areas with worse coverage and generally tends to suddenly expire on you quickly. A show stopper.

A recent update has fixed it for my Lumia 800. It didn't feel buggy to me to begin with, it just drained too soon. I would very much welcome a warning chime when the battery charge gets low; I understand some people may hate it, but this helped me to avoid running out of battery with other phones.

Also, you can prevent most applications from running in the background unnecessarily, and there is a battery saving mode to shut down non-essential background activities when the battery is running low.

Apparently, there hasn't been an update distributed for my area (Poland). The phone quit on me suddenly with 3/4 battery left - it happened just once, but still it hurt. Through trial and error, me and my colleagues, found out that charging through USB connection leads to erratic behaviors. Also: traveling by train or using data services, like maps. I have the battery saver on, but the most irksome part is the sheer unpredictability of the experience. Unused, the phone survives 4-5 days (guess why it was left in unused state).

- no easy way to access file system.

This is a geek requirement. Even the matter of having a file system bears little relevance to what most people use their phones for. This one does not have removable storage, neither does it pose as a USB mass storage device (and it's a good time we'd moved on from that antiquated interface), so what would you need the file system access for?

Come on, this is 12 GB of wasted space waiting to be used for DVD images, install files, running live distributions. This is a personal computer one can use to actually do stuff. Limiting it to syncing with social networks and playing media is akin to castration. Why would I use a smartphone for braindead activities only?

This.I've been using Nokia Lumia 800 for some time now, and while some aspects of the product are very polished, my overall opinion is negative.

Sample problems:- some tiles are animated, some not - pretty distracting experience.- while the interface is responsive, you still need to do several taps and slides to get a result you can set a single tap under an Android or iPhone.- 50k apps in the market if neither can do stuff I need.- no Google apps I need - sorry, Nokia, your phone needs to be able to join existing ecosystem.- battery - ye gods, hopefully those of you who purchase Nokia Lumia 900 do not experience the issues we have in EU with Nokia Lumia 800. In short, it's buggy, unpredictable, goes haywire in areas with worse coverage and generally tends to suddenly expire on you quickly. A show stopper.- no easy way to access file system.- display which simply fails in sunlight.- limited customization.

Apart from battery issues, it's a fine phone, but compared to my HTC Desire with MildWild... it just does not come close. Yes, my HTC Desire may not perform as quick in 'Smoked' tests, but it does what I need, including playing Angry Birds for free.